Jun. 9, 2008
Place text on your page, make changes to the original text file and it updates in Indesign automatically.
Did you know you can place your text files and spreadsheets on your page and maintain a link back to the original text file, so that any revisions to the original text file or spreadsheet are automatically updated in Indesign?
By default, when you place text into your layout there is no live link between the text on your layout and your original text that lives on your hard drive. So any changes you then make to the original text file when you are outside the Indesign layout and back in the native text editing program, MS Word or Text Edit for instance, aren’t displayed within your layout. You would have to go and re-place the text, or copy and paste and reformat the new text to get it looking the way you want on your page.
There’s an easy solution to this problem. Go in to your Indesign preferences, select the “Type” tab and you will see under the “Links” section the “Create Links When Placing Text and Spreadsheet Files” option. Choose this option. Now every time you place a text or spreadsheet file on your page you will get a live link in the links panel back to your original text file. Any changes you make to that original text file will be updated on your page.
Note: If when you go back into your Indesign page you don’t automatically see the revisions you made to your original text file, go to the links panel and choose “Update Link” from the fly out menu (top right of the panel) or select the “Update Link” icon from the bottom of the links panel and your text will update.
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2 Responses to “Text files as links”
Worth adding to this topic is that when linking to a text document, any formatting applied in InDesign via Paragraph or Character styles will be lost when updating the revised document. In other words, if you go back to the original document, make changes and re-save, all your hard work in InDesign to make the page look just so will be wiped out the moment the link is updated.
In fact, it’s for this reason that by the Preference to create links for documents and spreadsheets is unchecked by default.
By Scott Citron on Jun 11, 2008
I had this problem with reformting text when linking as a workaround however in my case I was linking to an excel table and if you apply a table cell style with a paragraph style applied within the cell style indesign retains the formting when the original excell is updated
By Ian Kelly on Jun 3, 2010